Latibule
by DoveFanworks
Summary: Arcee finds herself in a tight spot. Jack finds it far more amusing than he should. June just wishes every member of her family weren't so stubborn. [ONESHOT]


Jack had been around Cybertronians long enough now to know most of their body language and sound meanings. Not as well as Raf, who could practically glean a whole conversation just from how Bumblebee moved at times, but he knew the fundamentals.

Puffed up plating meant anger, defensiveness, surprise or even amusement, depending on the situation. Not dissimilar to a ticked off cat. Especially when Ratchet did it.

If the bot in question had what every human had collectively labelled 'doorwings', then you could tell a lot of their emotions from how they moved. Pricked for alert or content. Angled down or drooping for upset or submissive. In the somewhat rare occasion that they 'fluttered' it meant excitement or joy.

And was far cuter than it had any right to be on a giant alien robot.

Taking in the look and posture of his guardian at the current moment, it was hard to decide what exactly she was feeling. He was settled on awkward bewilderment for now.

To begin with, she was in the house. Not the garage, where there was fairly little of importance she could break with an errant twitch, but the actual house. The living room to be exact. He never thought he would be thankful for the fact that the living room joined directly to the garage, but he had a feeling that if they had had to corral Arcee down a hall or through virtually any enclosed portion of the house they wouldn't have even got her front tire through the door.

At one point he might have wondered how it had come to this, but then he recalled the decision had been made by his mother, and once her mind was made up not even the will of a God would shift it. Arcee was stubborn but against the likes of his mother? Laughable. And June Darby had deemed it a sin to condemn another sentient being to the garage like she was nothing but property, so of course she would just have to come into the house.

Not that he disagreed with the idea (and a large part of him found the sheer ridiculousness of the whole thing hilarious) but he could also see the concern. While they had never had many knickknacks to potentially be destroyed, when the thing doing the breaking was a giant robot that couldn't even stand in the largest room of the house, pretty much everything was fair game.

"I don't understand," Arcee said, and he almost felt bad for the utter hopelessness in her voice. Though that did pull him from his musings and back to the… other thing.

The thing a great many people didn't seem to realise (until it was too late) was that his mother was an unstoppable force wrapped in a small, unassuming body. When the secret had finally broke and she had become aware of the fact that there were aliens on the planet, and one of them was posing as his motorcycle, it had naturally triggered a lot of different reactions. One of them he definitely hadn't expected but now wasn't surprised at all about was what he, Miko and Raf all referred to as: the Mum Instinct.

It had taken all of a couple of days for his mother to get to know at least Arcee enough to start worrying for her when she went on missions. A couple days more and conversations between them were growing less stilted and testing. Another week and Jack was mortified to walk in on them both laughing over an embarrassing story of some dumb thing he had done when he was 7. A few more days had yielded something incredible. Arcee willingly talking about, an admittedly small but no less groundbreaking, part of her past to both of them one quiet evening. It was just shy of a month of her finding out that June had had enough.

If there was one thing he could always say about his mother, she would always provide for her family first. Perhaps simpler when it had just been the two of them. Neither of which was a giant alien robot. But according to the Mum Instinct, she had a new family member to take care of now.

And June 'Avelyn' Darby would be damned if she made a member of her family sleep on the floor of a garage.

So how exactly do you make a bed large enough for a robot that could easily span the length of the room if she stretched out? The answer was apparently half a stores worth of pillows and blankets.

Which finally brought him back to the truly incredible spectacle unfolding before him. His guardian couldn't have looked more utterly perplexed if she had tried.

Laid low by an admittedly mountainous pile of pillows of every size and colour, alongside every spare quilt and duvet in the house. He couldn't help it, he had to take just a little enjoyment out of it.

"What's the problem, Arcee?" He said cheerfully, grinning when she shot a truly venomous scowl down at him. June gave him a look to his right, before clearing her throat and trying hard not to look like she was masking a laugh.

"Well," she began, smiling gently and pretending she wasn't struggling to explain their wild idea for a Cybertronian-friendly bed, "we were thinking, it's not fair at all to make you sleep in the garage when you stay here, but since there's no way a human bed would work, we had to get creative."

"I'm flattered," Arcee replied, trying very hard to be polite and not utterly blindsided by yet more strange human customs, "but I don't need a bed, I can rest perfectly fine in my alt mode."

June immediately got that look in her eye. The look that spelled disaster for any who argued against her.

"Of course you can," she said evenly, "I've seen you can, but that doesn't mean we can't try and improve things for you."

"But I really don't need anything else," Arcee tried, flattening her plating impossibly even further, despite having over a whole head of space between her and the roof. June's expression twisted with concern, her slim eyebrows setting at a potentially dangerous tilt.

"I know you don't necessarily need anything else," she said gently, waving her hand to gesture to Jack then back to herself, "but we want you to be comfortable."

She paused a moment, letting her words sink in, before the hand still drifting in front of her curled into a dainty fist and she mumbled:

"And I really cannot stand the thought of you sleeping in a cold garage anymore."

"Technically I don't sleep," Arcee half-heartedly pointed out. A blatant lie if Jack had ever heard one. They might not have called it the same thing, and the mechanics of it might have been a little different, but the bots did need to sleep. Well, maybe Ratchet didn't, but only because he had never seen him do it.

"You do sleep and you also snore," Jack threw in his two cents. Arcee's icy gaze snapped across to him.

"I don't."

"Sure you don't," Jack nodded, "and you don't have ticklish wires either."

Arcee made a noise like a very small microphone with a feedback issue, while June took the moment to look between them both, sharing a longer look with him and Jack already knew he'd be retelling that particular story to her later.

"The point is," she interrupted before a full-scale argument could break out, "we just figured we could make the place more welcoming to you, surely you can't be happy in a dusty old garage?"

It made sense, he was sure no one would really be comfortable in their particularly tiny one, and it had irked him for a while now. Arcee, however, still seemed to be on her stubborn streak and wasn't quite done attempting to argue. Her optics flicked back to June, instantly losing their venomous edge, replaced with something quiet and wary. Though Jack knew this was far from over and she'd likely find a way to get back at him later.

"Then why not put all these in the garage? That'd be easier, and there's less risk I'll break anything."

June's eyes narrowed, the corners of her lips pulling down with displeasure. Jack sighed and resisted the urge to slap a hand to his face.

"You've already lost this, Cee," he said instead, "might as well just give it a try."

"The garage is filthy," June grumbled, crossing her arms and drumming the fingers of one hand against the sleeve of her night clothes, "you shouldn't have to deal with that, it's just… wrong."

"It doesn't bother me, I've been in far worse places."

It was more than a little baffling to him that Arcee was getting this bull-headed over something so small, but he wasn't surprised. She was too proud for her own good at times. But his mother had been dealing with an only child on her own for almost 16 years of her life and still had more than a few tricks up her sleeve. She switched tactics.

"Alright," she sighed, her shoulders slumping into that perfect slant to convey the most disappointment, "I won't make you do something you don't want, though it would be nice if you had tried out the idea first. You might find you like it."

The effect was so eerily on the mark Jack felt second-hand shame crawling up his neck. Arcee, despite her best efforts to seem it, wasn't spared either. The slight hitch of her doorwings gave her away, and the tiny readjustments the pink rings in her optics made as they did the Cybertronian equivalent of pupil dilations.

There was something perversely enjoyable about watching his 5-foot-9 mother march herself up to an alien robot she didn't even reach the knee of and use child shame tactics she had perfected on him to convince her to sleep literally anywhere but the dusty floor of a garage. Even if part of him twisted in distress at how quick Arcee was to brush off any attempts to care for her.

And even more incredible was that it seemed to have worked because Arcee diverted her gaze to the floor, grumbling something about stubborn humans with no real fire to it.

"One night," she conceded, wariness still heavy in her voice, "that's it."

June beamed.

"I'll let you decide that."

Jack idly wondered what they had gotten themselves into.

The rest of the night passed relatively uneventfully, though both himself and his mother kept careful tabs on their far larger housemate, taking note of things she seemed to take a liking to while they both went about preparing dinner. He had switched the tv on and, when the news only showed more depressing articles he didn't particularly feel like his guardian would want to see, he flicked over to the discovery channel, feeling something at least hopefully educational would be a safe bet. And June was always content with that.

Nature documentaries were a thing he wouldn't have guessed she would be interested in, but apparently David Attenborough's dulcet tones could weave their magic on aliens just as much as humans. In fact, she was so enraptured that at one point she was leant so far forward that her head was rested on the back of the couch, one hand curled over the arch of the top and optics wide as she watched a rather ridiculous looking Albatross patiently waiting to reunite with its mate on an island.

"That's damn cute," June whispered in his ear as she ducked past him into the living room, the pair of them settling on the couch to eat. The awkwardness of being in the house steadily melted away from Arcee entirely as they began to chat, making idle comments on the episode and other documentaries Jack promised he would dig up for her. Neither human failed to notice how she had leant her lower back and legs into some of the pillows, half curled up on her side so she didn't scratch up the walls.

The time ticked by quickly, and as the second episode came to an end (in which Arcee had actually tried to argue that the footage of mountain goats had to be fake), June forced herself up with a stretch and said her goodnights. She had an early starting shift the next morning and knew she'd regret it if she pushed it much later. With a wide yawn, Jack felt the responsible part of him push to follow suit, school was already a pain without deliberately depriving himself of sleep like some people he knew.

Arcee had returned them, then almost shyly asked if she could finish watching the next episode.

"Sweetie you can watch as much as you want," June replied, only half paying attention as she cleaned up the last of the dishes and definitely not catching the endearment she had tossed in, "just turn the tv off when you're done."

Faced away as she was, she didn't catch the startled look on the Autobot's face, but Jack did. He hid his smile by taking a sip from his water bottle, pretending to be focused on the animals on screen so Arcee could go on thinking no one else had seen the thrilled little smile that curled itself over her lips.

By the time he had finished preparing for bed and could feel his fatigue rising to usher him to his bed, it had almost completely left his mind that there had been any argument at all. By the time he had registered that there might have been sleep had too firm a hold on him, and he let it take him, drifting off to the muffled sound of orchestral music and stories of giant golden eagles.

* * *

The next thing Jack knew he was being shaken awake at an hour he wasn't even close to being able to comprehend. He was only vaguely aware that it was some ungodly time before his alarm was due to go off.

"Shh," June hissed, giving his shoulder another shake, "hurry and get up, you need to come see this."

Jack was pretty sure his response sounded something between the word 'what' and a zombie groan.

"Get up," June insisted, "and keep quiet."

Half a minute later, when his brain had finally caught up, he hauled himself out of the warm spot in the middle of the bed, half falling the last of the way and shambling after the blurry figure of his mother. She gestured furiously for silence when he banged straight into the hallway wall.

He was thankfully more alert when he reached the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and stifling a yawn into his arm. He looked back to his mum in bemusement, just beginning to open his mouth to ask what in the world was so important to wake him up before the sun had even risen.

June pointed into the adjoining living room.

Jack peeked his head around the wall and felt his jaw drop.

The mountain of pillows was still where they had constructed it in the open part of the room behind the couch. But it wasn't unoccupied.

Nestled amidst the cacophony of colours was, well, parts of his guardian. If she hadn't been pointed out to him he might not have even registered the pile had a resident as he got ready for school. But now he focused she was hard to miss.

Despite all their best efforts, they couldn't make the house itself larger, so Arcee was curled in an almost feline way, though she didn't seem uncomfortable. Far from it in fact.

She had not only settled on the pillow pile, she had burrowed into it. Half of the pillows had been dug out and meticulously placed over her back and sides (the heavier, weighted pillows he noticed she seemed to prefer). But it didn't end there. The pile of all the thickest blankets they could find had even been pulled into the fray, carefully draped over every part of her not covered by the cushions, and any remaining weren't going to waste. She was using three of the thickest, folded quilts as an actual pillow. And the end result was that only the top of her helm and crest horn, her doorwings (or winglets as Miko insisted, given motorcycles did not have doors), and the ends of her feet were visible.

Cybertronians may not have needed to breathe, but the soft, muffled whirring sounds emanating from the pile definitely were and always would be the giant space robot equivalent of snoring.

It was easily the greatest thing he had ever seen in his entire life.

June was almost glowing. Her hands clasped in front of her and smiling so wide it looked painful. She kept looking from him to their resident bot as though she needed confirmation that someone else was seeing it.

Arcee's winglets gave a slight twitch, a gust from her vents rustling the edges of the looser blankets, one silver hand appearing to curl around her makeshift pillow, pulling it closer so she could nuzzle her face more into the softness (excusing the fact that she didn't actually have a nose to nuzzle with).

He needed a photo. Now.

He darted back down the hall as quietly as he could, snatching up his phone from the nightstand and all but sprinting back in the fear he would miss his chance. June shot him a look when he returned, but it was tempered with a joyous amusement and he knew she wouldn't stop him. Not that she could. She wasn't the only one in the family with a stubborn streak when it mattered.

And this mattered an awful lot because God, he couldn't wait to drop this in the group chat.

Returning beside his mother he flicked the phone open and brought up the camera. As he lined up the shot and rushed to press the button however, he realised a fatal mistake, all too late.

The sound was still on.

The second the camera went off what had to be the loudest noise his phone had ever made followed. Possibly the loudest noise any phone had ever made.

Arcee jerked, sending a couple of pillows tumbling down the pile as her winglets shot straight up. Her head tilted enough to expose the upper half of her face, optics coming online in a brilliant flash and instantly zeroing in on her audience.

Even with only half of her face showing the deer-in-the-headlights look was uncanny. Though the illusion only lasted a moment before her gaze flicked from him, to June, back to him, and finally down to the phone pointed directly at her. Then they narrowed.

Jack wondered if this was how Bilbo had felt after waking Smaug.

He could feel June staring at him out the corner of her eye, possibly wondering at how she had birthed such a stupid young man. So, as any devoted mother would, she abandoned him to his fate.

"Good morning, Arcee, hope your night was pleasant," she said with a knowing smile, turning to sweep back into the kitchen, "you'll have to tell me what you thought later."

With that, she disappeared smoothly back down the hall and, moments later, the remaining pair heard the door to her room close.

Jack was furiously calculating if he could make it to the safety of the hall himself without getting grabbed by a furious Cybertronian.

"Jack," Arcee growled, as though sensing what he was planning.

"Sleep well, partner?"

A few more pillows tumbled to the floor as she shifted her weight just slightly.

"Delete that photo."

"I'll get back to you on that," he replied, then promptly took off running.

"You're gonna make me hunt you down after all, huh?" Arcee spat, lunging after him in a rainbow explosion of blankets and cushions.

"Mind the roof," June called from down the hall.

* * *

Check out the doodle my wonderful friend did that inspired this fluff fest: post/178231288844/consider-june-lets-arcee-sleep-in-the-house-after

And you can find my dedicated Transformers blog here if you're keen:

Thanks for reading! Any constructive feedback is extremely appreciated 3


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